Ukraine – Building State Capability

Coupling Action Learning and International Development

Guest blog written by Artem Shaipov

After completing the Implementing Public Policy Program and joining the IPP Community of Practice, I was thrilled to receive an invitation to work with a group of master students taking a class at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) titled, “Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) in Action: Development through facilitated emergence” (MLD 103).

The course objectives were to (i) introduce the students to the PDIA methodology and (ii) give them an opportunity to immediately apply what they learned in class to a specific policy challenge that I had a privilege to nominate. Working on advancing legal education reform in Ukraine, I asked the group of five students to approach the following development problem:

“The supply side of Ukraine’s legal system is inadequate for fulfilling the role and responsibilities of the legal profession in a modern democratic society, contributing to the legal system’s self-perpetuating failure to ensure the rule of law and deliver justice in Ukrainian society.”

To help the students get up to speed and hit the ground running, I provided them with a list of reading materials and other resources that gave them background information on their policy challenge and a list of stakeholders ranging from senior government officials, leaders of the bar to law deans, local experts, and student union leaders that the students could contact to learn more about the local context and better understand the problem they were about to start working on. This support was important to engage the students in problem solving from the start. One of the students reflected on this experience in the anonymous feedback:

“[Authorizer] was a great supporter of our work, and has provided excellent guidance in understanding the problem of legal education in Ukraine. He […] kept us highly engaged.“

The course spanned seven weeks starting in January 2021. The students met twice a week on Tuesdays for lectures delivered by Matt Andrews and Salimah Samji and Thursdays for check-ins with me as their authorizer. Each week, the students did research on the development problem, interviewed stakeholders, turned in individual and team assignments. Even after delivering their final presentation on March 11, 2021, the students willingly continued their action learning to complete remaining interviews. When providing anonymous feedback, one of the team members even noted:

“At first, I thought, this is kind of an abstract topic that I never really had any explicit interest in. But honestly, I really enjoyed using the PDIA process to explore this topic and learn more about Ukraine and the context in which challenges present themselves. [I]t was great to get into it as much as possible. I would be happy to support this USAID effort in the future.”

Exploring Legal Education Reform in Ukraine

Guest blog written by Ilhom Aliyev, Yousif Folathi Alkhoori, Manoj Kumar, Mike Ramirez, Frederick Tarantino

This is a blog series written by students at the Harvard Kennedy School who completed “PDIA in Action: Development Through Facilitated Emergence” (MLD 103) in March 2021. These are their learning journey stories.

MLD 103MA: Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) in Action: Development Through Facilitated Emergence is among the best classes at Harvard Kennedy School. This hidden infinity stone, 2-credit class challenges you to solve real-world, complex problems using the PDIA approach.

The tried-and-true PDIA process puts a learning structure in the way we look at complexity in local contexts from multiple perspectives. From a high-level, implementation includes a step-by-step approach of breaking down problems into its root cause, finding entry points, searching for possible solutions, taking actions, reflecting on what you learned, adapting, and repeating until the true solution is developed.

This semester, we were divided into teams to tackle real-world solutions. Our team, MY FM Inspiration, were given the challenge of examining legal education reform in Ukraine. Our authorizer was Artem Shaipov, a legal specialist and task leader for the USAID New Justice Program in Ukraine. In the first week, our team realized this problem had many dimensions to it.

There was an abundance of information to consume, and competing literature on what the problem actually was with legal education. To make the problem more difficult, many of us came from western legal education structures, but the Ukrainian legal education structure was very different, and in many ways still based off a Soviet Union era paradigm. Our team dived thickly into the topic with great humility and was focused on gathering as much information and learning as fast as possible. Our first fishbone diagram had nearly ~50 ribs and reflected the discoveries we obtained after the first two weeks.

It was hard to see a clear picture at the beginning. We found ourselves trying to dig past fake problems and problems that were just a lack of a specific solution. It was clear that PDIA was the correct method to use in this case because there was nothing linear about the challenges and potential solutions facing legal education in Ukraine. We had to fight the urge to try and find answers too quickly. The problem seemed to have a hundred gaps that each required individual keys and mastery.

Learning to Crawl: Can a Health Financing Reform Unshackle Ukraine’s Growth Potential?

Guest blog written by Dzhygyr Yuriy

This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Leading Economic Growth Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. Participants successfully completed this 10-week online course in July 2020. These are their learning journey stories.

Through past two decades, Ukraine has been steadily descending the Atlas economic complexity ranking list, going down from #30 in 2001 to #50 in 2016. At the lowest border of the second highest quintile, it is a relatively advanced economy and was assessed by Ricardo Hausmann’s international complexity simulations as having a significant potential to “move in all directions”. However, it currently remains invariably focused on agriculture and metals, exporting mainly to the immediate neighbors (Russian Federation and Poland), and has been gradually retreating from the more complex markets such as for vehicles, industrial machinery, optical and medical equipment.

The 2013-2014 social, political and economic crisis – which inspired the Revolution of Dignity, a change of government and a reversal of the geopolitical orientation – has created a hope for a new development strategy. However, five years down the road, many of the post-Maidan reforms are losing traction, calling for an audit of what went wrong.

In the hindsight, the problems targeted by the post-Maidan policies strike as remarkably astute. Most of these policies tried to address the low quality of public services – one of the core issues which enraged taxpayers and illustrated the state’s failure in 2013. But these reforms were not only in popular demand; they also happened to intuitively react to strong price signals of an extreme growth constraints.

The most striking example was the system of government-funded healthcare. By 2013, 92% of Ukrainians reported being terrified of catastrophic out-of-pocket costs if they get ill. Although the bulk of medical services in the country were tax-funded and provided by public facilities, de facto more than a half of costs were paid out of pocket through an entirely unregulated black market. Given the extreme information asymmetries, lack of competition and conflicts of interest, actual prices for healthcare in Ukraine have skyrocketed, exceeding the EU countries. Furthermore, while the state was failing to ensure quality control and continuous professional development of medical workers (reflected in the rapidly deteriorating health outcomes in the general population), selected categories of doctors were able to enjoy unusually high informal incomes despite the uncertain quality and safety of their services. The overpriced and unreliable healthcare was not only diverting private resources from productive investment, but also failed to provide the sense of economic security, social cohesion, and a robust state, ultimately depressing “animal spirit” throughout the society. This system of healthcare funding was also intrinsically obstructive to labor mobility within the country since access to services strictly dependent on the place of official residence.

PDIA Course Journey: Legal Education Reform in Ukraine

Guest blog written by Artem Shaipov, Ivan Shemelynets, Sheverdin Maksym, Maryna Yakubovych.

This is a team works for the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, the Legal Education Committee of the Ukrainian Bar Association, and the USAID New Justice Program in Ukraine. They successfully completed the 15-week Practice of PDIA online course that ended in December 2018. This is their story.

What were some key takeaways from this course?

This rigorous, insightful course helped our team to become a true team in the first place. We learned a lot on teamwork and multiagent leadership and obtained a better understanding of how, in fact, change materializes in different contexts.

We also gained a bird’s eye view on state capability and its development through the reading on the “big stuck” in state capability. We also got a more nuanced understanding of the accountability mechanisms through studying four relationships of accountability and how they affect development.

Our comparing and contrasting the 2015 problem with the 1804 problem was quite an eye-opening experience as we better understood how a true development is made possible — through problem-driven, iterative adaptations. Continue reading PDIA Course Journey: Legal Education Reform in Ukraine